


the rocks beneath

by Polexia_Aphrodite



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Civil War, Civil War, F/M, Historical AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-25
Packaged: 2017-12-31 09:45:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polexia_Aphrodite/pseuds/Polexia_Aphrodite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sergeant James Barnes can’t remember how long he’s been walking. All he can remember is the acrid black-powder stench of battle, the gut-wrenching death-cries of his men as they fell around him, the way their blood stained his hands when he pulled through their pockets to find spare cartridges. He remembers the choking, bottomless pain he had felt at Rappahannock, when the field surgeons had cut off his bullet-mangled arm.</i>
</p>
<p>Wounded Confederate soldier Sergeant James Barnes finds shelter in the pro-Union Lewis homestead. </p>
<p>A Darcy/Bucky Civil War AU. Because why not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At the moment my job requires me to do a bunch of research and writing on the Civil War, so I channeled some of it into this little thing. I don't really have plans to continue it, but...?
> 
> There's a graphic that goes with it [here](http://hardboiledmeggs.tumblr.com/post/65921920437/oh-hell-i-wrote-that-civil-war-au-anyway-its)

**Kentucky**  
 **December, 1863**

 

Sergeant James Barnes can’t remember how long he’s been walking. All he can remember is the acrid black-powder stench of battle, the gut-wrenching death-cries of his men as they fell around him, the way their blood stained his hands when he pulled through their pockets to find spare cartridges. He remembers the choking, bottomless pain he had felt at Rappahannock, when the field surgeons had cut off his bullet-mangled arm.

Now all there is is icy wind turning his face red and chapping his lips, and the dark forest around him. The soles of his boots have nearly worn through; the ruined flesh of his left shoulder aches in the cold, even with a wool blanket draped over what’s left of his tattered gray jacket. There’s a weariness in him that goes deeper than flesh, deeper than bone.

When he sees the cabin, a dark shadow under the darkening sky, with a yellow glow coming from one window and a curl of smoke rising up from the chimney, hope and dread bloom in his chest together. He knows he won't last another night out in the open. James pulls the blanket around him tighter to hide the gray and marches forward.

He’s twenty feet away, sunk ankle deep in the snow, when the front door clangs open. A dark-haired woman in a sooty calico dress strides out with the barrel of a Springfield leveled at his head.

“Stop where you are,” she barks.

James takes a moment to drink her in. If she kills him now, at least he’ll have gotten to see a woman one last time. She’s just a little thing; she’d barely pass his shoulder if she stood next to him. He can’t move his eyes from her face – pale skin, full pink lips and flashing blue-gray eyes. After everything, if this is the last thing he sees, it’ll be a blessing.

With her feet planted firmly on the wood slats of the porch and the muscles of her arms pulled taut under the weight of the rifle, Darcy Lewis stares daggers at the stranger on her doorstep. It’s been months since her father and brothers marched away in Yankee blue, never to return. When she sees the blood and mud on this man – his clothes are stiff with it – she can’t help but think of them. She can see the horrors he has witnessed written on his face, and she knows that her kin saw the same.

“Why aren’t you at the front, soldier?” she shouts, “Fightin’s not but ten miles east of here now.”

“Ain’t shootin’ so straight these days,” he says back. His voice is quiet, filled with exhaustion and defeat.

He shrugs the blanket from his shoulders and lets it land in the soft snow. His left sleeve is knotted just below his shoulder.

“Got nowhere else. No one else. ‘M a long way from home,” he pauses, purses his lips, swallows and steels himself, “If you could show a little kindness to a…to a countryman, I’d be forever in your debt.”

Darcy lets the barrel lower. She thinks of her frail mother and sister – still just a girl – inside the cabin behind her. She’d die before she let harm come to them. But, she decides, what harm could a half-dead, one-armed man do?

She sighs and frowns, then lets the rifle drop and waves him in.

“Come on then.”


	2. Chapter 2

“You can’t come in here dressed like that,” Darcy hisses as James steps up to the porch, “Give me your arms.”

He scrambles to hand over his pistol (he doesn’t have any shot, anyway), and the long knife from the sheath at his belt. He wants to thank her for not shooting him, for giving him a chance, but the words won’t come.

Darcy disappears into the cabin for a long few minutes; through the door he can hear women’s voices speaking back and forth. He leans against the house in the gathering dark, with his temple pressed against rough wood. Suddenly, this place feels like a home – like _someone else_ ’s home, like the kind of place he doesn’t belong in anymore. Not after the things he’s done.

When she reemerges her hands are full of clothes – brown canvas trousers and thick leather braces, a white linen shirt and a corduroy jacket. Two black boots dangle from one of her hands.

“These belonged to Samuel, my brother,” she tells him solemnly as she passes them over, “The Rebs shot him down at Fredericksburg.”

James nods, trying to seem just as earnest as she is.

Darcy shoots him a hard look, “If you breathe one traitorous word against the Union in this house, as God is my witness, I _will_ put a bullet between your eyes. Understand?”

“I do,” he says quickly. 

She leaves him alone on the porch in the quickly lowering light, to shuck off his stained and torn uniform and replace it with this dead man’s clothes. It’s the first time he’s changed his own clothes since he lost the arm, and he tries not to let his struggling bother him. When she comes back, she grabs the pile of gray wool out of his hands and shoves it into a crevice between the porch and the frozen earth.

“We’ll burn it tomorrow. Hope you weren’t attached.” 

James shakes his head. Then, so quiet she almost doesn’t hear him, he tilts his head towards his left shoulder and murmurs, “I couldn’t…”

She frowns, then picks up his meaning. Something indefinable crosses her face as she steps towards him. She reaches through the heavy, empty left sleeve of the jacket and pulls the linen shirt sleeve through. Plucking a pin from her apron pocket, she folds the fabric up and pins it at the shoulder.

Now that she’s up close and quiet, not threatening him or pointing a weapon at him, James can see that she’s even more beautiful than he had thought: her eyelashes are long and dark, spread across her cheekbones as she looks down at the fabric in her hands; her hair trails down her back. It shouldn’t, but his heart catches at the sight of her. Women have always made him weak.

“There,” she says when she’s finished, and she looks up to meet his eyes, “What are you called, anyway?”

“Sergeant James Barnes,” he tells her, trying to straighten his back, trying to have some pride in who he is, even if he doesn’t know what that means anymore.

“Mr. Barnes,” she nods and extends her hand and he takes it, “Miss Lewis.”

When she brings him inside, into the warm main room of the cabin, glowing in golden-red light from candles and firelight, when she introduces him to her mother, a hollow grief-stricken shell of a woman who gives him a kind look and a handshake, and her sister, a quiet, precocious ten-year-old, James struggles to keep himself composed and neutral.

The night before, he had slept alone under a tree, covered by a handful of branches, with an empty stomach and no way to keep the damp snow and frigid night air away. A handful of nights before that, he had slept in a makeshift hospital, asking God to let him die. And before that, he had spent countless months sleeping in trenches and on cots and in the muck, surrounded by doomed men. To go from that to _this_ fills him with an unbearable, ecstatic gratitude.

Even though the war has broken her, and even though it was her daughter who let him in, it becomes clear that Mrs. Lewis is the reigning head of the house.

“Where’re you headed?” she asks him as he takes a seat at their table in front of hot stew and warm bread.

“Don’t know,” he tells her, “Just couldn’t be where I was anymore.”

“Haven’t you got any family?”

“I had…a brother,” he clenches his jaw; it’s always been the easiest way to describe what Steve is to him, but even the thought of him makes James freeze up. “We lost touch a long time ago. I don’t know where he is now.”

Mrs. Lewis nods dispassionately. 

“Well, you ought to stay till spring,” Darcy shoots her a fiery look, “You’re not fit for fighting and there’s plenty of work ‘round here ‘til then.”

“Yes, ma’am,” James nods; he can’t remember a time in his life when he’s ever been this deferential, “Thank you, ma’am.”

*

Later, Darcy leads him up a rickety ladder to an upstairs loft. James can barely stand up straight under the low ceiling, but there’s a straw mattress on the floor with a heavy blanket over it, and that’s enough for him. 

“You’re an angel of the Lord, Miss Lewis.”

He grins at her, because now that he’s warmed up, with food in his belly, he’s starting to feel like himself again. 

“I’m no such thing,” she huffs, but he can see her cheeks redden and his grin widens in satisfaction. “Goodnight, Mr. Barnes.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has reviewed and kudo-ed this little story! Your positive feedback (and my extreme history nerdery) has kind of been what's kept this going. AUs are always sort of oddballs, and it's never a sure thing that people will like them, so I'm glad some of you are enjoying this.

It doesn’t take long – or it takes less long than Darcy had thought it would – for the four of them to settle into a satisfactory rhythm. James escorts them into town and to church on Sundays, and lets Mrs. Lewis assign him household chores. It takes weeks for her to admit it, but Darcy finally concedes that having him around has its advantages – he always gets the best deals at their general store, even though Ada Parsons, the manager, is ten years his senior, happily married, and ought to be too smart to be flirted with.

It takes longer for Darcy to accept how easily their neighbors welcome him into their close-bound community, and how easily they trust him. She can see the insinuating looks the two of them get when they’re out together, but Darcy never forgets who he is. She never forgets the colors he was wearing when she first saw him – the uniform she burned to ashes. It’s a thing no one else knows; it’s secret she’s kept without knowing why.

*

It takes James a long time to ask Darcy for a razor, because he knows that if she has one, it’ll have belonged to one of the dead men in her life. But at a certain point, the wiry mess of hair on his face becomes more than he can bear.

She sharpens her father’s razor and sets him up on the porch with a hand mirror, a bowl of warm water and a half-used cup of shaving soap. The snow and clouds have let up and the white-covered world gleams bright under a cold sun.

Maneuvering the razor with his right hand instead of his left is a challenge, and even in the warped mirror, he can tell he’s doing a terrible job.

When Darcy walks by him, wrapped in a long, dark coat, with her hands full of firewood and her cheeks pinched red by the cold, she gives him a hard look and sets down her load.

She grabs him by the chin and tilts his face up to hers. James gives her a rueful smile, then winces when the fresh cut at the corner of his mouth smarts.

“You’re making a mess of this,” she sighs, pulls off her gloves and holds out her hand until he puts the razor in it.

She steps between his parted knees, and the sudden closeness makes James straighten his back. Darcy hesitates, just for a moment, but it’s long enough for James to see that she’s only ever done this for her father or brothers. They're both quiet for a long beat, breathing puffs of condensation into the space between them.

The sudden intimacy of this hits James like a bolt of lightning; all he can think about is how easy it would be to touch her, to wrap his arm around her, to pull her onto his lap and press his lips to hers. He’s spent weeks trying not to wonder what it would be like to take comfort in this woman who saved him from the elements and himself, because he can tell that she’s better than he is, but now every treacherous desire he’s had for her comes rushing forward.

There’s no brush, so Darcy rubs her fingers on the damp soap and swipes her hand across his chin.

“This’ll be the only time I’ll do this,” she tells him as she scrapes the edge of the blade against his skin. There’s a waver in her voice that she’s fighting to conceal. “If General Howard can ride a horse with one arm, you can shave your own damn face.”

He tries not to smile. He knows she wants him to be his own man, to rise above his infirmity. He’s already been on the receiving end of several of her lectures about it.

Darcy’s left hand presses against his shoulder, then against the side of his neck to hold him still. James pushes down the ache in his chest.

“Tell me about your brother.”

He tells her that Steve isn’t really his brother, but that he’s the only person on earth who had stayed with him through the years, and that had meant more than blood. “When the war started,” he tells her, “he went north to fight with the boys in blue. He was always smarter than I was.”

She’s so close now, standing over him with a look of deep concentration on her face. 

“I never knew what I was fighting for. He always did.”

She doesn’t say anything, just keeps scratching the razor gently across his cheeks and jaw, with her other hand warm on his shoulder.

He asks her to tell him about her brothers, too, and she tells him about fastidious Samuel, and her younger brother, who sent them cartoon sketches of camp life until he was cut down at Gettysburg, just months ago. James doesn’t tell her that he was there, too. The thought that one of his bullets killed her brother in the midst of that bloody, hellish maelstrom is laughable, but the thought that she might even entertain the idea sends a chill through him.

“Where were you going, when you came here?” she asks him, after a long pause.

“Steve always talked about setting up in Nebraska Territory. Someplace under the wide open sky,” he shrugs, “I had nobody waitin’ for me back home, so I thought maybe I’d go there and wait for him.”

James feels her hand stall.

“You were going to walk to Nebraska in the dead of winter,” she says flatly, “Doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

He just gives her a tight smile. “Never was one for plans.”

Darcy feels something clench inside her. She can see in his face that he’s seen too much death to hope that Steve is still alive, and it hits her that his walk was something he only half-wanted to live through. Whatever their sufferings were, at least her brothers never felt the aching, yawning loneliness that she sees in this man under her hands.

She wets a cloth and runs it across his face and neck, wiping away the soapy residue and leaving behind clean, damp skin.

Then, without warning, she dips her head, bends slightly at the waist and, with one hand pressed to each of his shoulders, presses her lips to his right cheekbone. It’s only for a few seconds but it feels like time falls away. He smells like woodsmoke and leather and soap; his breath is hot on her cheek. She sees his eyelids slide shut.

Later, she’ll tell herself that she doesn’t know why she did it, but it’s a lie. She kisses him because he’s lonely and because she is, too. Because she can see how much he needs her. Because, despite herself, she wants to erase some of the awful things that have happened to him. And, hell, because he’s handsome, and because he’s even more handsome when he’s clean-shaven.

When she pulls away from him, he looks up at her with wide eyes. She moves to go inside, and his hand closes around her wrist. She doesn’t look back at him – she can’t – just twists her arm until he releases her and disappears into the cabin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested in the historical background stuff in this, "General Howard" refers to Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who was a major figure throughout the war and led troops at Gettysburg. Howard lost his right arm in 1862 after being shot at the Battle of Fair Oaks.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks so much to everyone who has read, kudo-ed, subscribed, or commented on this story. I've got a little soft spot for this one, so I'm glad you guys are enjoying it :)

The next month is plagued by too many stolen glances and too much stifled longing. They both get good at figuring out how to touch each other without letting it seem too purposeful: Darcy lets her fingers brush his when she passes him things; when he walks her through town, James lets her take his arm or presses his hand to the small of her back. The worst of it, Darcy thinks, is when necessity forces them to sit too close to each other in the pews during Sunday services. The press of his thigh against hers, even though it’s through layers of fabric, makes her shudder and pray even harder for salvation.

It’s past midnight on a cold, winter night when Darcy wakes up to her sister’s hands on her shoulders, shaking her awake. When her eyes open, little Eliza tells her to be quiet and listen. Darcy can hear muffled, faint cries coming from the loft.

“It’s Mr. Barnes,” she whispers. She tells Eliza to go back to bed; she tells her that she’ll take care of it.

*

_As he rushes towards the Federal line, the loudest thing James can hear is the sound of his own breath, coming in short, panicked gasps. To the left of him, to the right, he can see artillery shells take out dozens of men at a time. The men behind him –_ his _men – howl out a Rebel Yell, but it’s all bravado. He saw their stricken faces the night before, and now he can hear their voices silenced one by one._

_He tells himself to keep running, to follow his orders even if they kill him. In front of him, a solid blue line grows larger and larger as he gets closer. His palms are sweaty where they’re wrapped around the smooth wood of his rifle, with its sharp bayonet fixed towards the Yankee troops._

_A sudden searing, tearing pain rips through his gut and sends him to the ground. All around him, gray-clad soldiers rush past him, still on their way to the fight. James tears at his clothes – rips open his jacket and pulls his undershirt clear over his head. If he can see where the ball went in, he’ll know if he has a chance, but his belly is wet with blood and he knows it’s a killing shot. His eyes slide shut._

_All there is to do now is wait, but there’s someone over him, someone who has him by the shoulders, someone who whispers his name so loud he can hear it over the din of battle._

_His eyes shoot open._

*

James jerks awake suddenly, sitting up and struggling for breath. He doesn’t remember how she got there, or why, but Darcy’s sitting next to him, perched on the edge of the mattress with her legs folded under her hips; she’s lit up in golden candlelight from a lantern on the floor.

The flannel shirt he fell asleep in is gone, and he realizes that he must have pulled it off. The cold night air wraps around his bare chest and back, but something’s wrong with his right arm. He looks down at himself, then squeezes his eyes shut. Darcy’s one step ahead of him: the shirt’s caught on his arm, wrapped tight around the muscle there. In the dim candlelight, with one arm covered in dark fabric and his left arm cut short at the shoulder, it almost looks like he has no arms at all. 

Without thinking, Darcy sinks her fingers into the fabric and yanks the sleeve down, from his bicep to his wrist. She pulls it over his hand and tosses it to the floor. 

“See?” she gasps, “It’s all right.”

James opens his eyes, and she can see that they’re watery and red-rimmed. The sight of him like this, rubbed raw and haunted by things she can only imagine, tears through her. She brings her hands to the sides of his face, but it’s not enough. Her arms wrap around his bare shoulders and she hauls him against her. The heat of him – his chest against hers, his arm around her waist, his breath against her shoulder – seeps through the thin cotton of her nightgown.

Darcy turns her face into the curve where his neck meets his shoulder and, even though she truly knows better, she presses her lips to the warm skin there. The sigh he gives, the way his arm tightens around her, makes a flood of warmth spread out from her chest, down her arms, all the way to her fingertips. In some dim corner of her mind, she can see how inappropriate this is – to have him undressed and in her arms, to know how badly they both want each other and let it happen anyway – and she’s trying so hard to let go of him.

Not hard enough, though. Something akin to instinct brings her lips to his temple, his forehead, his cheeks and cheekbones and brow. She feels the hard muscles under her hands soften; she feels him sigh again and melt against her. When she presses a kiss to the exposed flesh just above his scarred, ruined left shoulder, James shudders in her arms.

Darcy smiles to herself. This man’s been making her into a fool from the moment she first saw him, because he’s exposed her soft heart for what it is, and because he’s torn apart, piece by piece, all of her old hatreds and prejudice. Without words, he’s told her every day that he needs her, that he wants her, that he could love her.

James starts when her mouth presses against his, but recovers fast, tugging her tighter against him and parting his lips under hers. She buries her fingers in his hair and lets loose a soft moan as his tongue slides against hers. It feels like something he never thought he’d get – like a homecoming. He loses himself in her for a long moment before she pulls back, gasping for air.

“You shouldn’t kiss a fella like that,” he murmurs, “Not if you want him to ever leave you alone again.”

“I don’t want you to leave me alone,” she sighs, and _oh_ , the fire that shoots through him when she says it.

James pulls her into his lap and across it, letting her fall back onto the mattress beside him. Darcy goes so willingly, never once taking her hands off of him; it’s almost more than he can believe. She asks him to touch her – she even says _please_. As much as his body sings out for it, he doesn’t dare press his hand between her legs, so he runs his palm over her cotton nightgown, along the curves of her shoulders, her breasts, up and down her long arms and narrow waist. He combs his fingers through her dark hair and kisses a trail from her neck to her collarbone, stopping just above the lacy neckline of her chemise.

He’d be lying if he said touching her didn’t make him feel a little more complete, a little more like a man. The quiet whimper he draws from her when he rolls one hard nipple between his fingers shoots straight to his groin, and he has to shift his hips away from her to hide his hardness.

She lets him kiss her for what feels like forever; it feels like the longest he’s held onto something so pure and happy in ages and ages. But, at last, her hands go still on his shoulders.

“You should try to sleep,” she tells him, pressing her hands against his chest and sitting up. He sits up with her, catching her with his arm around her waist.

“I’d sleep sounder with a pretty girl to keep my bed warm,” he grins and presses his lips to the side of her neck. The sheer shock of having her so completely is starting to fade, and now he’s hardly ready to let her go.

She pulls away from him with one eyebrow raised. “You’ll be sleeping out of doors if my mother finds me here.”

Darcy stands, bent at the waist to keep from hitting her head against the rafters, lifts the lantern in one hand and picks up his shirt from the floor in the other. She tosses it at his chest and he catches it.

“Goodnight, Mr. Barnes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In battlefield photographs from the Civil War period, it's not uncommon to see soldiers in some state of undress. After being shot, some would tear at their own clothes to find the entry wound, which would then give them an idea of their chances for survival. 
> 
> So, you know, in case you thought I was just gratuitously trying to get Bucky's shirt off. It was an historical undressing.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a little more of this. Thanks so much to everyone who has commented and kudo-ed on this story so far. I wish I was better at responding to comments (I really am trying!), but I just get too swamped and wrapped up in writing the next thing and then at a certain point an awkward amount of time has passed, so. But let it be known that feedback is very, very appreciated.

Spring comes early. The snow turns into slush, and, as the world warms, the slush turns into a vast sea of mud and muck. The forest surrounding the Lewis homestead turns from white to green.

Those who ought to know say that the war is bound to end soon, but there are still too many Rebel incursions along the Tennessee border and too many names added to the list of Union dead. There’s a rising tide of anger in their little hamlet, an outrage and frustration that explodes when volunteer troops start to march streams of Confederate prisoners through town. 

The first time it happens, Darcy and James watch it together. Darcy watches as her neighbors – gentle souls who sit beside her in church every Sunday – jeer and spit and howl at the defeated men. She understands their pain and rage – she’s felt all of it and more over the deaths of her father and brothers. She wonders if, were it not for James, she would have joined them. 

But then she sees how James’ jaw clenches and unclenches as they pass by, and she sees them as he must – mere boys in mismatched, torn uniforms, their bare feet sticking in the mud, their wounds untended and gangrenous. She slips her hand into his and leads him away. Neither of them can afford to feel anything about it.

*

It’s a bright, cold morning when James finds Darcy hanging laundry to dry. He walks up to her with his hand shoved in his pocket and his head down. She’s damn beautiful – bathed in sunlight and surrounded by panels of white sheets – and it isn’t making his mission any easier.

When she sees him, she smiles. It’s almost too unbearable, and he almost turns around right then. He doesn’t recall when exactly it became more frightening to speak his mind to this woman than to run towards cannon fire, but he supposes it was around the same time he realized how utterly and completely he had fallen in love with her.

“Look,” he pulls a folded broadside out of his pocket, the kind that get pasted up in saloons and general stores, and hands it to her. “Lincoln’s givin’ out land for practically nothin’.”

Darcy raises an eyebrow and unfolds the paper in her hands. She reads over the type carefully. For fourteen dollars, he could have one hundred and sixty acres of wide-open, Western land.

“He’s not giving it to Confederates. It says so right here.”

“So I won’t be a Confederate anymore,” he shrugs and snatches the sheet back. “You’re the only one who knows that about me. I could be anyone. Can’t stay here much longer, anyway. You can see how things’re changing.”

She pulls a clean, white sheet from her basket, stretches up to clip it to the line, and picks up another. The thought of him leaving, of him being so far away, sends a wave of icy dread through her, but Darcy manages to keep her expression hard and neutral. She knows what he means – with the way the war is changing the world, the way the war is changing _people_ , he can’t be safe here much longer.

James tucks the paper back into his jacket pocket. His eyes are fixed on the ground.

“They’re givin’ double the acreage to married couples.”

Darcy freezes. She’s thought of it a million times since that night in the loft – what it would be like to make a home with him, to let him take her to bed in a way that God wouldn’t frown upon, to let herself be his wife. But she manages to straighten her back and level a steely glare at him nonetheless.

“If that’s a proposal, it’s the worst one I’ve ever heard.”

“How many have you heard?” He frowns and furrows his brow.

The answer is, of course, _none_ , but Darcy just gives him a coy smirk and raises her eyebrows expectantly. 

He steps forward, his boots squelching in the muddy earth. Reaching forward, he pulls the cotton sheet out of her hand and lets it land in the basket. His arm curls around her, tugging her against him until her body is flush with his. The air around them is crisp and cool, but he’s so _warm_ ; at the feel of his breath, hot against the side of her neck, Darcy turns her face into his chest.

“Marry me, Miss Lewis,” he murmurs, and it’s all Darcy can do to keep her tears at bay. It doesn’t matter anymore whether he wore blue or gray. Maybe it never did.

Words won’t come, so she nods against his shoulder and reaches up to take his face in her hands. The pads of her thumbs brush the stubble along his jaw.

“Never felt like—“ James starts, because even though she’s already agreed to be his, maybe he ought to throw in a few more flowery words for good measure. “No one’s ever…” 

He trails off and looks away. He wishes he were the kind of man who could put a voice to what she’s done for him – wishes he could tell her that it was her kindness that drove him back from the brink, her touch that had made him feel like a man again, when all he had been before was a broken soldier.

Darcy winds her arms around his neck and pulls him down, presses her mouth to his. It’s nothing like the chaste peck she first gave him, nor is it like the searing, staggering kisses from the night in the loft. It’s sloppy and uncoordinated, all bumping noses and clashing teeth, because neither of them can stop smiling like fools. 

When Darcy fists her hands in his shirt and tells him she loves him, James starts to think that this – _this_ – is why he was spared, why bullets and artillery shells and the elements couldn’t kill him. He was meant to make _this_ woman _this_ happy. He was meant for this moment.

*

After a while, Confederates on their way to prison camps in the North become a routine sight in town. James and Darcy see it happen again, and again and again. But then one of them – a sandy haired boy in a tattered gray jacket who can’t be a day over eighteen – sees James and shouts out for _Sergeant Barnes_ in a hoarse, Carolinian drawl that sends a bolt of panic shooting down Darcy’s spine.

Darcy tries to keep steady, but lets her eyes flicker up to his. When she sees the grief and horror and guilt on his face, when she sees that he’s paralyzed by it, all she can do is grab his hand and yank him through the crowd and all the way home. 

She prays to God, and to Mary and the angels and all that’s holy, that no one noticed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Note: The broadside in this story is an advertisement for land claims under the Homestead Act of 1862. If you're an expert on this act, forgive me for the artistic license I've undoubtedly taken with it.


End file.
